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This poem refers to self-harm and to depression linked to the menstrual cycle.
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I am an eldest daughter,
A big sister, and my husband’s wife;
Perhaps I was even a mother
In another, much different life.
Before anything though, a woman is what I am:
A monolith of flesh with bosoms and a womb;
And a mental list of house chores like a loaded dam,
Monthly leakage of old blood stemming from an empty tomb.
A built-in calendar of roughly twenty eight days
Gifts me with all-consuming fatigue and anxiety,
And a faint lyrical song of self-harm constantly plays,
Always debilitating and enfeebling—downright insanity.
Tell me this: how does one continue to live well
Amidst so much dysphoria and death in the brain?
To keep fighting the urge within me to just quell
The source of this suffering and feminine pain?
Yet the chemicals that run within this mere vessel,
Regardless of how turbulent they may become,
Are exactly where I think they’re meant to settle:
Inside a resolute survivor, sprinting in every thrum.
The grace this body bids and this body deserves,
Outshines the shame and stigma that society imposes.
During nights I no longer feel my weight and my nerves,
By what I’ll endure, tomorrow I know there will be roses.
And while shackles are wrung around my lucidity,
And imbalances moor my skeleton where it awakens,
There also come bursts of power and sheer ability
To latch back onto life with electrifying cadence.
There is inevitable freedom in being a woman,
In the innate need to care without any condition,
In having emotions deemed ‘sensitive’ by a man,
Our bodies and brains, often abused beyond cognition.
So let this sacred expanse of mortal tissue carry me
Through all that faces it, from joy to grief to joy once again;
Countless aches—month after month—let me be fazed to see
The magnitude of endurance damsels carry within their den.
For being a woman equates that bleeding is my nature,
The vocation is to coexist with pain, unlike mothers’ sons.
My body is a monolith of life, death, endurance, anguish, ardor;
Joined within an endlessly reviving spirit, all of them alive at once. ∎
